Dog has his day: Write-ins get 5 percent of vote in Whatcom prosecutor's race

Possibly fed up with the lack of choice on the ballot for Whatcom County prosecutor, or inspired by the look of sincerity on a Bellingham dog's face, 5 percent of voters opted to write in a name rather than vote for the lone candidate, 10-term incumbent Dave McEachran.

According to Debbie Adelstein in the Auditor's Office, 1,219 votes in the prosecutor's race were write-ins, compared to 23,305 votes for McEachran. (The auditor's webpage does not include the write-in totals.)

That's a tremendous number of write-in votes -- the percent breakdown is 5.0 percent to 95.0 percent -- especially when you consider that a write-in need only receive 1 percent of the vote in an uncontested primary to get his or her name on the general election ballot.

Because Nyima -- the dog whose social media campaign for the Prosecutor's Office gained national attention -- is not a registered voter, the votes cast for him will not be counted, Adelstein has said. There's no way to immediately know how many of the 1,219 write-ins went to Nyima. If any human lawyers who are registered to vote in Whatcom County managed to get 1 percent of the total vote as a write-in, I'm sure Adelstein will let us know.